For Neal Horsley, Abortion Is Murder. For The Practicing Doctors Listed On His Website, So Is Murder.

The righteous man, a notable participant in the armed-abortion conflict, rocks on the front porch of his glass house.

JONATHAN O'TOOLE IS NINETEEN YEARS OLD. HE IS FROM KANSAS CITY. FOR THE LAST COUPLE OF months, he's been sleeping, oversleeping rather, in the spare bedroom of Neal's white-porched house on its sylvan cul-de-sac in Carrollton, Georgia. God sent Jonathan here to help Neal save the babies. But for the moment, he snoozes.

Jonathan always knows that he's almost awake when he feels a little morning twinge in his right arm where the Akita at the animal shelter where he worked sunk its teeth in and wouldn't let go. For half an hour that damn dog held on, tightened its vise grip, as Jonathan punched it in the face as hard as he could. Blood was pooled every where, Jonathan was covered in it, and he was about passed out by the time his rescuers arrived. He could hear them whispering: My God, never seen anything like this kid's arm. That was a year ago, and now Jonathan knows what pain is. And his pain makes him identify with the babies even more. The pain increases his grief. Jonathan thanks God for the pain. He feels it has liberated him.

He swings his legs over the side of the bed, sits there for a second, coming to, and then he runs his fingers lightly over the twisted Frankenstein graft that is his reconstructed arm, taps the mottled skin softly to get feeling. Time to get up.

As he pads in his plaid pajamas down the hall and around the corner into the living room, he sees the master of the house, Neal Horsley, sitting at the computer workstation in his glass-enclosed office off the dining room. "Come look at what I did," Neal says, motioning to him, excited.

Neal has executed some commands on his Web site, which is called The Nuremberg Files: Visualize the Abortionists on Trial. On the Web site, he collects the names, addresses, and photos of hundreds of doctors across America who perform abortions. Also supplied are pictures of the doctors' houses and cars, license-plate numbers, names and dates of birth of their children, churches and pastors and rabbis, social-activity information, and career profiles, as in: "Has been butchering babies for sixteen years." Neal smiles broadly and bellows, "I would not want to be in the business of abortin' babies in the United States of America today!"

Neal wears reading glasses, green sweatpants stained with paint, a red sweatshirt, and bedroom slippers. A little earlier, he had typed in "Barnett Slepian," the name of the doctor killed last night in Buffalo by a sniper while standing in his kitchen with his wife and two young sons. He then tapped the strike command on his keyboard, which drew a black line through Slepian's name.

When Neal tells him that an abortionist was shot in his own home, Jonathan knows what that means. Despite hundreds of bombings, acid attacks, and killings at clinics over the past two decades, never before in America has somebody killed a doctor at home. This changes everything. For Jonathan, it's the next logical step. It's exciting.

Not every day you get a kill. Neal hums along with "Tangled Up in Blue" and leans back, admiring the color monitor. Animated blood flows down the screen. Big piles of fetuses and aborted body parts. Links to dozens of like-minded sites, all gathered in Neal's Internet domain, christiangallery.com. "Good mornin'!" Neal booms, cracking Jonathan on the back. He's in a celebrating mood. "Welcome back to the living!"

When Jonathan showed up at Neal's doorstep two months ago, he was so overwhelmed with grief for the babies that he felt he was on the verge of committing a violent act. He found Neal by searching for the words murder and abortion on the Internet in his parents' basement, and now here he is. Make me an instrument of the movement, he told Neal. Put me on the front lines; teach me. Neal said fine. Gonna show this boy how to turn the Internet into a weapon. Since then, Jonathan has become a sort of aide-de-camp to Neal, processing new doctor information: receiving it from all over, confirming it, inputting it, and uploading it onto the Web site. He's a classic good boy--apple-cheeked, real eager, real serious about his Bible, and reliable. Eats like a horse and is still growing. He was the kind kid in school, the one who befriended the retarded boy when no one else would, always identified with the underdog. Whatsoever you do to the least of my brothers, that you do unto me. Jonathan's not perfect by any means. He does have a little trouble getting out of bed. Last night, he was up late composing a love letter to Holly, a college girl from California he met on-line recently. "Dear Holly," the letter began, "I have come to the realization that my life, and all that I am, is in God's hands." Some nights, he stays up maintaining the abortionist roll call, studying the faces over and over, feeling anger and pity for the butchers.

Jonathan stares at the screen, at the former Barnett Slepian, OB/GYN. Seven other names have also been crossed out; these are the doctors, nurses, and escorts who have been killed in bombings and ambushes in the past few years. Fifteen more names are shaded gray--they have been seriously wounded. Neal reaches to the keyboard to show Jonathan something. It's just a simple command to go from wounded to dead. Jonathan has added lots of names to this list, but this is the first positive result he's actually gotten to participate in. Seeya, Barnett.

This is exactly what the Scriptures promised would happen to those who sow bloodshed. "Nowhere to run," Jonathan says, congratulating Neal. "Nowhere to hide."

SIX HOURS PASS. GLORIA FELDT, THE PRESIDENT OF PLANNED PARENThood, is holding a press conference, accusing Neal of inciting the murder of Dr. Slepian. She produces a copy of Neal's list with the crossed-out name. She then says that Dr. Slepian's name was marked out before he was killed.

"We'll sue her ass!" Neal tells Jonathan. "That's slander!" But Neal has already calculated that the more people think he was involved in the murder, the more they'll visit his Web site.

The accusation, in truth, is the best publicity Neal could get. You can't buy that kind of publicity. It's very good for the movement, of course. The public has got to know, if it doesn't already, that there will be more killings. No more pussyfooting around. But it's also very good for Neal. He's never dreamed of this kind of attention. "Yes, sir, we'll sue her ass!" Neal says again, this time cackling. Neal's cackle rings with utter delight.

EVERY WEEKDAY, NEAL DRIVES INTO ATLANTA, WHERE HE WORKS ON computer databases for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. He doesn't want anyone to know that, and at work he goes by his first name, Otis. So when the press calls start coming in, Neal tells Jonathan, "Just say I'm a computer programmer, nothing more." Neal wants to maintain a real separation between his daily bread and his antiabortion activities. He's good at what he does, and he likes his house, with its white porch and the Bradford pear trees, and he wants to keep paying the mortgage and supporting his family. He calls it paradise here.

Dr. Slepian probably liked his family a lot, too, and wanted to support them, as did the security guard who died in Birmingham, Alabama, and the nurse who had shrapnel and nails from a pipe bomb driven into her legs and eye. But these folks were in the baby-slaughter business, and, as Neal keeps telling the reporters, this is a war, and there will be casualties.

In the three years since he started his Web site, Neal hasn't ever gotten television producers even to return his calls, except once when he heard from the Jerry Springer Show. Now the networks are calling, along with dozens of print and radio reporters. Tomorrow, he'll be mentioned on the front page of The New York Times.

Jonathan picks up the phone, which has been ringing incessantly in the two days since the killing. It's NBC, wanting a satellite feed with Neal. How long before he can be ready?

On Monday evening, seventy-two hours after Slepian's murder, the names begin to come in. By e-mail and snail mail. Envelopes stuffed with photographs, addresses, and names of more abortion doctors are stacked all over the office. Sent from cities and small towns across America, they also include the names of nurses, clinic escorts, and politicians. One letter, written in longhand, has a dozen new names and includes this postscript: "I got the nurses' names at night from a Dumpster behind the clinic."

The e-mails are running thirty-to-one condemning the Web site. But even the negative e-mails make Neal giddy. He has struck a nerve. Jonathan sorts the hate e-mails into "death threats" and "curses." One begins, "Die, Neal Horsley, Die."

"File that with the curses," Neal says.

"It's not a death threat?" Jonathan asks.

Neal shakes his head. "That's a seriously developed curse." Another reads, "You are an idiot of the highest degree." Neal is delighted. "That's good!" he yells. "Better than being an idiot of the lowest degree."

Just as Neal had promised, Jonathan is right on the front lines. He can hardly keep up with all the new names and all the e-mails. Neal tells him not to worry about the threats. "We got us a good Jesus," he says. "He holds our enemies' hearts in his hand."

October 28

Mr. Neal Horsley,

I am pleased to tell you that after I finish this letter, my partner and I will catch the first flight to your town. We have a bullet with your name written on it. Hope to see you smile after we've shot you through the spine.

October 28

Watch your back, son . . . you will be shot. Be forewarned . . . this is not an idle threat. To add insult to injury, you will be killed on December 25, 1998. Jesus Christ's birthday. Watch your back. I'm deadly serious.

WHEN NEAL GOES TO WORK, HE FINDS PICTURES FROM HIS WEB SITE TAPED inside the elevators. All week long, he feels his coworkers watching him. Most did not know his political views before, and his exposure on national television has alarmed them. They fear his work gives him access to confidential information about doctors, including home addresses and social security numbers.

By the end of the week, he gets a call from his supervisor. There will be a meeting to discuss this, and Neal's attendance is required. Several of the top brass at CDC will be there.

"Shall I bring my lawyer?" Neal asks.

ON HALLOWEEN, BARNETT SLEPIAN HAS BEEN DEAD FOR EIGHT DAYS, Neal has had a million new hits to his Web site, and an FBI task force is sniffing around. The Justice Department is promising a separate investigation. Neal jokes that the new neighbors might just be from the government. There is an echo on the phone, and he reminds everybody to say hi to the FBI when making calls. He's never been happier in his life.

Jonathan is at the kitchen counter, carving the jack-o'-lantern, reaching in to pull out the wet orange pulp and seeds. He saws a jagged smile into the face, handling the knife with the surety of a young man who spent his childhood skinning rabbits. He cuts wide slits for the eyes and a triangle nose.

Neal is only a few feet away at the workstation. He is singing along to Bob Dylan's "We Live in a Political World." A love for Dylan is one of the things he and Jonathan share. The first song Jonathan ever heard as a kid was when his father would play Dylan's "Man Gave Names to All the Animals." Neal is particularly happy tonight. The boys at CDC didn't know they were dealing with someone who knew his rights. His job performance is excellent, and he conducts himself in a professional manner, so how can they touch him? The most they could do was move him to a remote facility away from everybody else. A clear victory for free speech, Neal believes. Of course, he's not supposed to tell anybody about the arrangement.

As Neal taps away, joyously answering e-mails, Jonathan can hear the machine beeping steadily as new mail comes in. One message is from Bob Lokey, a long-haul trucker who wants to pay a visit in the morning. He's got urgent matters to discuss with Neal. Before spending twenty years in San Quentin on a first-degree-murder conviction, Lokey was trained by the U. S. Army to infiltrate enemy lines as an intelligence operative. Now, in addition to hauling freight, he's working full-time inspiring people to kill doctors. Any word from Lokey is always exciting to Neal. The man's love for the babies is inspiring.

Neal's wife, Carol, is upstairs working on a research paper for her graduate work in speech and language pathology. Yesterday at school, someone asked her if she was related to Neal. It made her proud to say yes, but she is concerned that Neal isn't choosing his words carefully right now, and she's a little afraid of how it will change their lives. Carol is used to plenty of change with Neal. When they met, he was selling pot, had hair down to his waist, and was known to all as Cowboy Neal. At one point, Cowboy Neal's big dream had been to seed America with marijuana. He wanted everyone high. He spent a little time locked up instead. That's where Neal found Jesus.

A few years out of prison, he enrolled at Westminster Theological Seminary, outside Philadelphia. Neal's father had died from a mysterious infection four months before he was born. Neal says that just days before he passed, knowing that he would never see his child, his father talked deliriously to his unborn son from his deathbed, telling him that everything was going to be okay. In seminary, Neal felt called to speak for unborn babies and to reassure them that they were going to be okay, too. In a talk delivered before he graduated, in 1985, Neal predicted that someday Christians would be aiming rifles at abortionists.

Five months before Carol and Neal met, she had an abortion. She was only sixteen at the time. Years later, when they wanted to start a family, Carol couldn't get pregnant. Neal told her that she never would conceive unless she truly asked God's forgiveness. She resented Neal bitterly for saying it, and she reminded him that he had once begged a girlfriend to have an abortion and that after she had refused, he had never even seen his child. No, Neal had said, I haven't been perfect, but if you want to start a family, you've got to get right with God. After Carol got on her knees and begged forgiveness, she got pregnant.

Neal and Carol's seventeen-year-old daughter, Kathy, bounces down the stairs from her bedroom, where she's been holed up on the phone with her girlfriend, and announces that she's going out to a Halloween party.

"Have you fed Negro?" Neal asks. "Don't let that cat in." As she leaves, he looks after her admiringly. "Lordy, Lordy, is she beautiful," he sighs. Kathy is the youngest of the Horsleys' three children. She has two older brothers. One is an army sergeant stationed in Germany, and the other is on the debate team at Georgia State. A talker and a shooter, Neal likes to say.

As Jonathan lights the candle in the pumpkin, the kids begin to arrive, and Neal calls an end to the day's work. He gets into the Halloween spirit, sitting in his rocking chair as the night darkens, greeting his neighbors as they cross his porch. He tries to guess who is under each mask. One kid carries a bloodied plastic chain saw; there are several Spice Girls; others are dressed as hunters. "Our local militia," Neal says. Locked in a room off the porch, Jesse, the family's schnauzer, is yipping. Negro, crouched in the bushes, watches with his glowing green eyes.

"Neato frito!" Neal exclaims at one kid's outfit. The kid lifts up his mask and glares at Neal. "Hey, don't call me names," he says. Neal practically falls out of his chair laughing.

Jonathan sits on the porch swing. He has rolled up the cuffs of his blue jeans and is smoking a corncob pipe. He's been thinking about all the publicity he and Neal have been getting. It's been great, a real charge, and if this is what the Lord wants of him, so be it, but Jonathan wants to do something; that's why he came here. He knows that Neal is living in the sniper's reflected glory; without the killing, they wouldn't have had so many more hits to their Web site. But it's so much more important to remember, he believes, that without the threat of death, doctors will never stop killing the babies. What's the next move? Somewhere out there is a sniper who hasn't been caught. Now is no time to let up. He's been thinking a lot about Paul Hill and how that good man on death row didn't sit idle on a comfortable cul-de-sac. He did something. He shot Dr. Britton. Butcher Britton. Jonathan is in a quiet mood and doesn't feel much like playing.

Finally, the kids stop coming, and Neal turns out the porch light. At about 11:00, as he does every night, he falls asleep in his chair. After a few minutes of snoring, he wakes himself up. "Carol," he calls out to his wife softly, in the voice of a child. "Carol. Caaaa-rooool. Need my snuggy buggy. Sleepy-pie time. Need my sleepy pally. Need my snuggy buggy. Carol!"

AT 4:00 A.M., JONATHAN IS STILL AWAKE, ANTICIPATING THE ARRIVAL OF Bob Lokey. He's never met a killer before.

He's got such a sense of destiny about this, and always has. Sometimes his level of intensity has scared people. When Jonathan asks his e-mail friend Holly to take a look at The Nuremberg Files to get an idea of what he's about, she goes south on him. You believe this stuff? she writes, signing her e-mail "Your sister in Christ."

Jonathan figures any man who holds a baby in his arms or who watches a child being born could never tolerate abortion. When he was seven, he watched his sister being born. He has since swaddled each of his newborn siblings in his arms, cut their umbilical cords, seen the mystery and beauty of birth.

He took part in his first abortion protest when he was eight.His father was the pastor of a tiny charismatic church in Salt Lake City; the congregation met in a rented restaurant on Sunday mornings. When church elders voted to picket the local abortion clinic, Jonathan's mother took him along, joining about twenty-five kids, most from his home-school group. The church elders locked arms in front of the clinic's glass doors. Jonathan and the other children each wore a sandwich-board protest sign. Some were decorated with a photo of a fetus in a trash can.

The police arrived, and Jonathan watched as his Sunday-school teacher was handcuffed. He wished he could have done more. When he was ten, his family moved to a rented farm outside Kansas City, where Jonathan was home-schooled by his mother and grandmother. In the eighth grade, he was enrolled in a small Christian school. He loved reading Tolkien and C. S. Lewis, but the Bible was his favorite book.

Jonathan was not prepared for public high school. "I'd never been exposed to anything vaguely resembling the world before," he says. "I wanted desperately to live somewhere where the law of God was the law of the land. I lacked the social skills to relate to people who hadn't grown up in a church environment. I went between being withdrawn to having an air of superiority."

Gym class was particularly painful. He had never played team sports and could barely throw a ball.He began to lift weights to fill out his six-foot frame. One night during his sophomore year, he had a dream in which he stalked into gym class with an automatic rifle and slaughtered his classmates. "I just mowed them down, and I didn't feel any guilt until I woke up."

A mythology class was one of the few bright spots. He fell in love with Latin and Greek, plowing through Homer, Virgil, and Ovid. Jonathan took his SATs early, and at sixteen he was admitted into the great-books program at St. John's College in Annapolis, Maryland. His parents didn't have tuition money, though, so instead he accepted a full scholarship to Rose Hill, a tiny Greek Orthodox college in South Carolina, delaying his enrollment until his mother gave birth to his youngest brother in September 1996.

Watching his baby brother come into the world was the most beautiful thing he'd ever seen. His brother was smaller and more fragile than his other siblings, and as he held the tiny child, he remembered the sign he had worn as a kid. That aborted baby didn't look so different from his brother.

When he left for college, he took along a pistol. By day at Rose Hill, he read Aristotle, Plato, and Plutarch; by night, he surfed the Internet at the campus library, trying to educate himself on the antiabortion movement.

On a Web site called Prisoners of Christ, he discovered Shelley Shannon, the thirty-seven-year-old housewife whose spree of abortion bombings ended in 1993 after she shot a doctor in both arms outside his Wichita, Kansas, clinic. Jonathan wrote to Shannon in prison, sending his prayers and telling her that he supported her actions. "I could tell by her letters that she took pleasure in what she did," he says. He loves that she kept pictures of burned clinics in her cell.

"I was really ashamed of myself, reading about this woman who had the courage to do what I felt like I oughta been doing--her all alone, and she's a woman."

He talked with other students about terrorizing abortion clinics, and his talk scared people. After thirty of his classmates held a special meeting to discuss their fears, Jonathan left school and returned home to his parents, taking the job at the animal shelter where he was injured. As part of his rehabilitation, he practiced shooting a .22 rifle out his bedroom window. Even with his mangled arm, he could hit a moving squirrel from sixty yards.

WHEN HE WAS IN PRISON, BOB LOKEY TATTOOED A WOMAN'S NAME ON the head of his penis. Actually, he meant to spell "Charlene," but it hurt too much, and he is left with the letters char hanging there forever, unless he should choose to have them removed. And that's unlikely, because Charlene was the only woman he cared anything for, the mother of his two children and his former wife. He lost her after he went to prison in 1962.

He was still in prison in 1973 when the Supreme Court rendered its decision in Roe v. Wade. The legalization of abortion changed Lokey's life. God spoke to him for the first time and told him to do something about it.

Now Lokey is fifty-eight years old, a powerfully built, gray-bearded man with massive forearms flecked with other fading jailhouse tattoos. He doesn't eat red meat. He does yoga most every day, even when he's on the road. He's a black belt in tae kwon do. When he steps out of his Tempo in Neal's driveway, he is wearing blue jeans and sandals with white socks. He looks like a cross between Hemingway and Popeye.

Jonathan overslept, and he is still pretty much asleep when he meets Lokey, who shakes his hand--grabs it and really wrings it out. On the inside of his right forearm is a baby angel blowing a horn, surrounded by fluffy clouds. "I read your poem about the use of force on the Web site," Lokey tells Jonathan. His voice is a deep southern rumble. "That's a powerful poem."

Lokey has not yet loosened his grip. "You love the babies, don't you?"

"Yes, sir. I do."

"I can tell. Never let anybody tell you that babies aren't souls before they are born. I have memories that predate my own conception."

Neal has told Jonathan that Lokey is the best trained and most disciplined soldier of his generation, the cream of the crop of potential assassins. Lokey is obsessed. Only an obsessed man plants a sixteen-by-twenty billboard of aborted fetuses in his front yard, as Lokey has done on a country road between Opp and Elba, Alabama.

Lokey drove five hours up from his trailer there to talk strategy. He's concerned about all the heat Neal is getting. Especially about the death threats. "If they want to kill somebody," Lokey says, "have 'em kill me. There's nothing I'd like more than being nailed on a cross for the babies."

Lokey has his own home page linked to Neal's Web site. On it, he writes that killing doctors is justifiable homicide. "I'm the one causing you all these problems," Lokey says as the three settle in the den. When Neal holds up his hand to remind him that tape recorders are running, Lokey says, "I don't give a damn. Any of the three of us could be FBI."

"But you must understand what's going on here," Neal says. "The media is trying to say I incited the sniper to kill."

"And that should make you very proud. It sure makes me proud," Lokey says. "I threw out my TV a long time ago. I hate the media."

"Journalists are ball-less, spineless cowards who have been pussy-whipped and vaginally defeated," Neal says, shaking with laughter. "Can I get an amen?"

"Lokey, you crack me up," Neal says. "I had some wild sex just last night, right upstairs. Hell, smoking dope, fucking, and boozing--that's who I am naturally. But now I got me a good Jesus. I haven't touched the weed for eighteen years, and I only have sex with my wife."

Jonathan couldn't believe what he heard. The closest his parents ever came to suggesting that sex had occurred between them was saying that they had "gotten pregnant."

"I've ridden a mule," Jonathan said. "But you screwed one?"

"Yep."

Jonathan is still a virgin. And until he clicked on Neal's Web site, he'd never seen another man's erection, much less two guys kissing. He'd never even heard of fist fucking. Neal calls this part of his Web site the Desecration Digest. It also features photos of a woman sucking off a rottweiler. There's a snapshot of a woman shitting into a man's mouth. The pictures make a lot of Christians uneasy, but Neal, who also sells jail faggots bumper stickers on the Web site, says the decision to show these photos was inspired by a passage from the Bible: "Have nothing to do with the fruitless deeds of darkness but rather expose them." The porn is Neal's bait and switch. Mixed in are images of mangled fetuses. "We want to smuggle the images into people's brains." Yesterday, amid the hate e-mails, he got an e-mail that made him hoot: "More girl-on-girl pix!"

Lokey wants to get down to business. He leans forward, addressing Neal. "There are people that I'm absolutely certain have read my Web site and have gone and killed somebody or hurt somebody. That was my intention."

"Look here, buddy," Lokey says. "In my life, I've discovered that sometimes violence is necessary, and if it is, you just have to roll up your shirtsleeves and dive in."

"And so what you just said," Neal says, "is that you're absolutely certain that your Web site, which is located on my Christian gallery . . ."

Lokey ignores his concern. He is studying the room, with its country furniture and paintings of ducks. His eyes pass over every object, as if for the last time. Then he looks out the large windows of the den to the pond and into the nearby woods. The smell of brewing coffee is in the air. Finally, Lokey looks at Jonathan. "A man should be safe in his own house, right?"

Jonathan nods.

"Not in a war," Lokey says. "There's nobody safe. And when you kill in a war, it's not murder. People get killed in war. That's what happens."

IN THE EVENING, NEAL AND JESSE GO ON THEIR WALKABOUT THROUGH the neighborhood, as they do most evenings, getting exercise and saying hello to the kids, who all love to pet Jesse. As Neal's green sweatpants disappear around a bend in the road, Lokey and Jonathan stand alone on the porch. Jonathan is very impressed with Lokey's uncompromising air. He had Neal sounding like a man who just wants to preserve his comfort. He had Neal sounding timid. Jonathan wasn't questioning Neal's commitment, but if he wanted practicality, if he wanted to be safe, he'd go back to picketing clinics. Lokey has never picketed clinics. "I can't go near them. I'd kill somebody with my bare hands."

"But Lokey," Jonathan says, "what if God told you to kill? What if that's what God wants?"

"I would kill," Lokey says.

God spoke to him in prison. "I was called to circumcise myself. I obeyed the call," he tells Jonathan. Lokey tried to compromise with God, asked the prison doctor to do the operation. When he was refused, Lokey, who was forty at the time, took a single-edged razor blade and, sitting on the toilet after lights-out at San Quentin, cut away his own foreskin.

"God took and guided my hand. It was the same as if he had done it with his own hand."

Lokey turns to Jonathan. "You don't tell one other person your plan," he says. "Not even Neal--he might say something in his sleep. But when God calls, Jonathan, you answer."

The next day, Jonathan e-mails Lokey:

Lokey--

I'm enraged within myself. Hatred has become my driving force. It is a hatred which pours out from a fountain of love for the unborn children. . . .

I am very ashamed of myself. I speak about a fountain of love for the unborn, but where is the evidence of that? Lokey, it's building up inside of me. I can't contain it forever. I am containing it now, and trusting that the Lord knows how much I can take.

Lokey's response surprises and disappoints Jonathan:

Jonathan--

I need to caution you about getting too close to these babies. Your time will come. You have to wait for it, and don't push it, don't rush it. You will know when it is here and you will know what to do. It might be any of a number of things. . . . Not being there yet does not spell failure. . . .

Now, I can't expect the babies not to be on your mind twenty-four hours a day, as they are on mine. And I wouldn't have it any other way for myself. We can't do everything alone right at this moment. The world will catch up and then hell will break loose. I give my most solemn word on this.

NOVEMBER 11, VETERANS DAY, HAS BECOME, TO SOME IN THE ANTI- abortion movement, Remembrance Day, the day to commemorate the aborted birthdays of the unborn. Much of the violence against abortion providers in the past few years has happened in the weeks leading up to this date. Dr. Slepian received a faxed warning to this effect on the day he was shot.

On November 9, Neal takes a trip into town to check his mailbox. Since he started becoming famous, he's been receiving checks in the mail. From just a few dollars to several hundred, to support The Nuremberg Files. Today, there's a pretty nice haul, nine envelopes. Sitting in his car, he opens the third envelope, which contains a letter that reads, "You have just been exposed to anthrax." Probably a hoax, but within an hour, Neal is being scrubbed by technicians wearing space suits and oxygen tanks, just in case the letter actually contained the deadly bacteria.

But before getting decontaminated, he calls Jonathan at home. "Send out a press release!" he instructs. "I've been anthraxed!" Back at home, in interview after interview, the story becomes sort of a routine. "Anthraxed! I've been anthraxed!" Jonathan must hear Neal say that to a dozen reporters.

Michael Bray, who served nearly four years in prison for bombing clinics in the Washington, D.-C., area, e-mails to say, "I'm glad it was you and not me." The anthraxing puts Neal's picture on the front page of the Atlanta newspaper. Looking at it, Neal says to his daughter, "Good thing I'm married, because if I had to rely on that photo to get laid, I'd be in trouble."

Jesse, the family dog, is dead. Two nights ago, he came into the house, panting, whimpering, clearly in pain, and then he walked off into the woods and died. Neal is sad and says it was just Jesse's time to go. But Jonathan worked at an animal shelter, and he knows a poisoned dog when he sees one.

THE NIGHT BEFORE HE GOES HOME FOR THANKSGIVING, JONATHAN AND Kathy go see The Wizard of Oz. Jonathan has been careful not to become too friendly with Kathy in the months at Neal's house, but now she is almost like family. On the way to the movie, they get very lost, and Jonathan begins singing Christian praise songs. For hours, they drive the back roads, singing and praying for each other.

They have much to pray about. That day at school, a girl shouted at Kathy across the lunch table, "I know somebody who wants to blow your house up!" The police came to the house after school. Kathy doesn't know how seriously to take the threat, but somebody once threatened to kill Jesse, and now Jesse is dead.

The next morning, Jonathan climbs onto a bus to return to Kansas City, carrying most of the things he owns in a duffel bag. Neal hugs his neck, and it crosses Jonathan's mind that they may never see each other again.

Raking his cowboy hat low over his eyes, Jonathan settles into a seat in back for the twenty-hour trip home. He waves goodbye to Neal and says a quick prayer for the safety of the Horsleys. He lifts his heart to Jesus. Thy will be done.

An older woman with red-haired, Celtic good looks is seated a few rows ahead. She's mid-thirties and slim. As the miles roll by, Jonathan tries to catch her eye. He stretches his legs, drags the heels of his cowboy boots across the floor. He whistles a tune.

Somewhere across the Tennessee border, with the whole night ahead of them, the woman ambles back and sits beside him. "So, are you really a cowboy?"

She'd been in Florida, taking care of an old man and his retarded son, and, like Jonathan, is now headed back to Kansas City. "I love your voice," she says after they've talked for a while, "and your eyes." He tells her that he designs Web sites for a radical pro-life group. She hardly believes he's still a teenager. By early dark, they are kissing, and after they switch buses in Nashville, they sleep through the night in each other's arms.

Two days back in Kansas City, they meet up at a bar. After Jonathan has four beers, they climb to the roof of a nearby building where the woman used to live. There, on a blanket, near the elevator shaft, Jonathan loses his virginity. Behind him, he can hear the black machinery of the elevator grinding.

Pull out before you come, she had told him. She wasn't on the pill and didn't want to get pregnant. He ignored the request, and as he came inside her, it occurred to him, as it had often occurred to him recently, that he didn't know how long he would live, and that he had an expectation of early death. If God chose to plant the seed, that would be all right with Jonathan. A warrior needs to leave a legacy, he thought.

The next day, Jonathan drove out to a lady gunsmith at Guns Unlimited in Clay County, Missouri, and bought two rifles, a Ruger .22 and a Winchester 30-30. He paid cash.

Later, as he crouched in the woods, using a hedge-apple tree for support, he aimed the Ruger at his target. The crisp early-winter air was on his face, and as he looked through the scope and pulled the trigger, he thought only of the babies.

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